Mirco Göpfert
Biographic Data
| ID | 149754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mirco Göpfert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mirco |
| FAMILY NAME | Göpfert |
| SIGNATURE | GÖPFERT M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 73 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
On dictators and clowns
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin, with a penchant for absurdly long tables and known as a bare-chested horseman and bear tamer, deployed a massive army to invade Ukraine, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian, dancer and actor, who has demonstrated hitherto unimaginable leadership skills. Our political present is grotesque. Politicians erupt as caricatures of themselves, and comedians win elections. Satirical late-night productions outp…
Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger
This book explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, the book looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the other. The book contends that bureaucracy and police work emerge in …
Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger
In Policing the Frontier, the second book in the Police/Worlds series Mirco Göpfert explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, he looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the …
Epistemophilic obsessions: Espionage, secrets, and the ethnographer's will to know
As a young ethnographer, I was weirdly obsessed with closed doors and what was going on behind them. To some extent I still am. How come? Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and secrets in a fieldwork setting particularly prone to secrecy and mutual spying, namely the Nigerien gendarmerie, this essay is as an investigation into the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology, as called for by Johannes Fabian…
Police in Africa
State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. This book brings together criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others who have engaged with police forces across the continent and the publics with whom they interact to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa’s police forces. The contributo…
Inside the Police Stations in Maputo City: The Street Level View
This chapter explores how police officers in Maputo, Mozambique, deal with everyday criminal cases. It discusses how police officers draw on a large and flexible repertoire of measures when handling cases, some of them formal, others informal. Their choice is often shaped by the competition for legitimacy they find themselves in with communities and private actors
Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie
Sometimes it just seems wrong (or too much work) to enforce the law à la lettre. Then police officers may either turn a blind eye to particular situations or give you a warning instead of a ticket. The gendarmes in Niger do that as well, and they call this in Hausa 'gyara', meaning 'repair'. Taking seriously the gendarmes' perspective, their search for justice, as well as this notion of repair, I propose a little anthropological twist: it is not …
Surveillance in Niger: "Gendarmes and the Problem of "Seeing Things
Today, high-tech surveillance seems omnipresent in Niger, particularly because of the conflicts in neighboring Mali, Libya, and Nigeria and efforts by the U.S. and France to boost local security agencies. However, Niger is not a very efficient "registering machine," and the gendarmes have very limited knowledge of the communities in which they work. The key to overcoming this problem of knowledge-to "see things," as the gendarmes put it-is the nu…
Travelling police: The potential for change in the wake of police reform in West Africa
Police models travel around the globe and many arrive in the shape of police reforms in West Africa. On the ground, these transnational connections are composed of interactions between police officers carrying and receiving such models. Similar to the travel of other models, African officers usually adapt and subvert official reforms. In this article, we argue that the potential for wide-ranging organisational change is caused not so much by thes…
Körling, Gabriella: In Search of the State. An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger
Anthropos , Seite 333 - 334
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Police violence in West Africa: Perpetrators' and ethnographers' dilemmas
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie
Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes' socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and o…
Security in Niamey: An anthropological perspective on policing and an act of terrorism in Niger
The abduction of two Frenchmen in January 2011 in Niamey's supposedly most secure neighbourhood has led many to question the functioning of the city's security apparatus. This paper analyses Niamey's security landscape, initially from an historical and then from a spatial perspective. It argues that for a comprehensive analysis of security, we must first decentre our perspective on security construction, and thus take informal non-organised modes…
Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie
Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes' socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and o…
Police violence in West Africa: Perpetrators' and ethnographers' dilemmas
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
Security in Niamey: An anthropological perspective on policing and an act of terrorism in Niger
The abduction of two Frenchmen in January 2011 in Niamey's supposedly most secure neighbourhood has led many to question the functioning of the city's security apparatus. This paper analyses Niamey's security landscape, initially from an historical and then from a spatial perspective. It argues that for a comprehensive analysis of security, we must first decentre our perspective on security construction, and thus take informal non-organised modes…
Surveillance in Niger: "Gendarmes and the Problem of "Seeing Things
Today, high-tech surveillance seems omnipresent in Niger, particularly because of the conflicts in neighboring Mali, Libya, and Nigeria and efforts by the U.S. and France to boost local security agencies. However, Niger is not a very efficient "registering machine," and the gendarmes have very limited knowledge of the communities in which they work. The key to overcoming this problem of knowledge-to "see things," as the gendarmes put it-is the nu…
Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie
Sometimes it just seems wrong (or too much work) to enforce the law à la lettre. Then police officers may either turn a blind eye to particular situations or give you a warning instead of a ticket. The gendarmes in Niger do that as well, and they call this in Hausa 'gyara', meaning 'repair'. Taking seriously the gendarmes' perspective, their search for justice, as well as this notion of repair, I propose a little anthropological twist: it is not …
Epistemophilic obsessions: Espionage, secrets, and the ethnographer's will to know
As a young ethnographer, I was weirdly obsessed with closed doors and what was going on behind them. To some extent I still am. How come? Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and secrets in a fieldwork setting particularly prone to secrecy and mutual spying, namely the Nigerien gendarmerie, this essay is as an investigation into the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology, as called for by Johannes Fabian…
Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger
In Policing the Frontier, the second book in the Police/Worlds series Mirco Göpfert explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, he looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the …
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Security in Niamey: An anthropological perspective on policing and an act of terrorism in Niger
The abduction of two Frenchmen in January 2011 in Niamey's supposedly most secure neighbourhood has led many to question the functioning of the city's security apparatus. This paper analyses Niamey's security landscape, initially from an historical and then from a spatial perspective. It argues that for a comprehensive analysis of security, we must first decentre our perspective on security construction, and thus take informal non-organised modes…
Körling, Gabriella: In Search of the State. An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger
Anthropos , Seite 333 - 334
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Police violence in West Africa: Perpetrators' and ethnographers' dilemmas
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie
Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes' socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and o…
Travelling police: The potential for change in the wake of police reform in West Africa
Police models travel around the globe and many arrive in the shape of police reforms in West Africa. On the ground, these transnational connections are composed of interactions between police officers carrying and receiving such models. Similar to the travel of other models, African officers usually adapt and subvert official reforms. In this article, we argue that the potential for wide-ranging organisational change is caused not so much by thes…
Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie
Sometimes it just seems wrong (or too much work) to enforce the law à la lettre. Then police officers may either turn a blind eye to particular situations or give you a warning instead of a ticket. The gendarmes in Niger do that as well, and they call this in Hausa 'gyara', meaning 'repair'. Taking seriously the gendarmes' perspective, their search for justice, as well as this notion of repair, I propose a little anthropological twist: it is not …
Surveillance in Niger: "Gendarmes and the Problem of "Seeing Things
Today, high-tech surveillance seems omnipresent in Niger, particularly because of the conflicts in neighboring Mali, Libya, and Nigeria and efforts by the U.S. and France to boost local security agencies. However, Niger is not a very efficient "registering machine," and the gendarmes have very limited knowledge of the communities in which they work. The key to overcoming this problem of knowledge-to "see things," as the gendarmes put it-is the nu…
Police in Africa
State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. This book brings together criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others who have engaged with police forces across the continent and the publics with whom they interact to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa’s police forces. The contributo…
Inside the Police Stations in Maputo City: The Street Level View
This chapter explores how police officers in Maputo, Mozambique, deal with everyday criminal cases. It discusses how police officers draw on a large and flexible repertoire of measures when handling cases, some of them formal, others informal. Their choice is often shaped by the competition for legitimacy they find themselves in with communities and private actors
Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger
This book explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, the book looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the other. The book contends that bureaucracy and police work emerge in …
Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger
In Policing the Frontier, the second book in the Police/Worlds series Mirco Göpfert explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, he looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the …
Epistemophilic obsessions: Espionage, secrets, and the ethnographer's will to know
As a young ethnographer, I was weirdly obsessed with closed doors and what was going on behind them. To some extent I still am. How come? Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and secrets in a fieldwork setting particularly prone to secrecy and mutual spying, namely the Nigerien gendarmerie, this essay is as an investigation into the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology, as called for by Johannes Fabian…
On dictators and clowns
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin, with a penchant for absurdly long tables and known as a bare-chested horseman and bear tamer, deployed a massive army to invade Ukraine, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian, dancer and actor, who has demonstrated hitherto unimaginable leadership skills. Our political present is grotesque. Politicians erupt as caricatures of themselves, and comedians win elections. Satirical late-night productions outp…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (6 works) · Ethnography (5 works) · Criminology (4 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Africa (3 works) · Anthropology (3 works)